Nationwide, there are thousands of local radio stations. Many of these local radio stations have quite similar playlists and play similar themed music. These local radio stations all purchase their music from national services. The national services supply the music, but the creation of the “local station identifiers” has always been left up to the local radio stations themselves.
These unique local station identifiers are typically played both during and between songs, and can be linked to particular programs, contests and awards. The variety of local station identifiers can include the local stations announcing their call signals, or playing a sound, tune or jingle. Typically, these unique station identifiers combine music clips with a voice-over announcement. For example, an announcement like: “This is station KABC playing the hits” can be played over a combination of clips of various songs that best exemplify the playlist of that station.
Designing unique local station identifiers for local radio stations is quite important since this is what “brands” the local station in the minds of its listeners. Therefore, the music selected to be played in the background behind a vocal announcement must be both current and representative of the music played by the station. The songs that are most current are always changing and it is therefore desirable to keep re-formulating the station identifiers such that the most up-to-date music can be played together with the various voiceovers.
As a result, preparing these station identifiers involves a lot of work and audio engineering. Typically, an audio engineer at each local radio station must combine the desired audio files (e.g.: the music or music clips played together with the voice-over) into a single audio file that can be played by the local radio station. Unfortunately, the software that is currently in use for this sort of radio production services requires local assembly and expertise by a person with a high level of audio skills. There is simply currently no automated solution for creating and downloading pre-mixed audio content that is uniquely branded for each particular radio station. Thus, for audio material that is meant to go out to hundreds of radio stations, existing tools do not allow the audio content to be individually customized for each of these stations. Therefore, mass scale customization for local radio stations has currently been impossible. It would instead be desirable to provide a system for large scale internet distribution of audio content with individual radio station customization.
Secondly, existing internet based audio mixing software does not allow the combination of two or more WAV audio files using cuing time markers codes to be output as a single audio file—with the possibility for these two files to be playing simultaneously. It would instead be desirable to provide a system in which audio files could easily be combined, but with their individual play times being staggered such that they may overlap while starting at different cueing times.
Lastly, existing audio software that is based on MP3 files does not adhere to consistent time code cueing markers. In other words, each output file will have differences, even if made up of the same components. It would instead be desirable to provide a system that operates with MP3 files, but does not have these limitations.